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THE FIRST LAWS AND THE FIRST INVADERS—GREEKS, PHŒNICIANS, ROMANS AND GOTHS

Hispania was the name by which the Romans called the peninsula which is made up of Spain and Portugal. The origin of the name is disputed. To the Greeks the country was known as Hesperia—the Land of the Setting Sun. According to Mariana,[1] Spain is called after its founder, Hispanus, a son or grandson of Hercules. But, for reasons hereinafter related, better authorities derive it from the Phœnician Span.

There is a legend which Mariana recites, to the effect that the primal laws of Spain were written in verse, and framed six thousand years before the beginning of Time. To medieval makers of chronicles, Tubal, fifth son of Japhet, was the first to set foot on its shore. But earlier historians, ignorant of Noah’s descendant, and, it may be, better informed, hold that after the episodes connected with the Golden Fleece, the Argonauts, guided by Hercules, sailed the seas and loitered a while in Spain, where they were joined by refugees escaping from the totter and fall of Troy. Black was their national color. It has been retained in the mantillas of to-day. After the Greek adventurers came the Phœnicians. The latter, a peaceful people, born traders, as are all of Semitic origin, founded a colony at Gaddir (Cadiz). In a remoter era they had established themselves at Canaan, where they built Bylos, Sidon and Tyre. From Tyre emigrants moved to Africa. Their headquarters was Kartha-Hadath, literally Newtown, that Carthage in whose ruins Marius was to weep. The Phœnicians, as has been noted, were a peaceful people. Under a burning sun their younger brothers developed into tigers. They had the storm for ally. They ravaged the coast like whirlwinds. They took Sicily, then Sardinia. Presently there was a quarrel at Gaddir. It was only natural that the Phœnicians should ask aid of their relatives. The Carthaginians responded, and, finding the country to their taste, took possession of it on their own account. To the Romans, with whom already they had crossed swords, they said nothing of this new possession. It seemed wiser to leave it unmentioned than to guard it with protecting, yet disclosive, treaties. More than once they scuttled their triremes—suspicious sails were following them to its shore. From this vigilance the name of Spain is derived. In Punic, Span signifies hidden.

The hiding of Spain was possible when the Romans were still in the nursery. But when the Romans grew up, when they had conquered Greece, and all of Italy was theirs, their enterprises developed. Up to this time the two nations had been almost allies. At once they were open rivals. It was a question between them as to whom the world should belong.

The arguments on this subject, known as the Punic Wars, were three in number. The first resulted in a loss of Sicily and Sardinia. In the second, Spain went. In the third, Carthage was razed to the ground.

It was with the conquest of Sagentum—a conquest not achieved until the surviving inhabitants of that beleaguered city had committed suicide—that annexation began. Then, slowly, at one time advancing, at another retreating, now defeated, now defeating, the Romans promenaded their eagles down the coast. Scipio came and watched the self-destruction of the Numantians, as Hannibal had watched the Sagentums fall. Pompey, boasting that he had made the Republic mistress of a thousand towns, came too; and after him Cæsar, who, long before, as simple quæstor, had wept at Cadiz because of Alexander, who at his age had conquered the world—Cæsar, his face blanched with tireless debauches, came back and gave the land its coup de grace. In this fashion, with an unhealed wound in every province, Spain crawled down to Augustus’s feet. A toga was thrown over her. When it was withdrawn the wounds had healed. She was a Roman province, the most flourishing, perhaps, and surely the most fair.

The fusion of the two peoples was immediate. The native soldiery were sent off to bleed in the four corners of the globe, to that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived and which it took years to reach, or nearer home in Gaul, or else far to the north among the Teuton States; and, in the absence of an element which might have turned ugly, the Romans found it easy work to open school. They had always been partial to Greek learning, and they inculcated it on the slightest pretext. They imported their borrowed Pantheon, their local Hercules, all the metamorphosed and irritable gods, and with becoming liberality added to them those divinities whom their adopted children most revered. It was in this way that the fusion of the two races came about. When Augustus assumed the purple, throughout the entire peninsula Latin was generally in use. It was not of the purest, to be sure. It had been beaten in with the sword, the accent was rough and the construction bristled with barbarisms; but still it was Latin, and needed only a generation of sandpaper to become polished and refined. But perhaps the least recognized factor in the fusion of the two peoples was a growing and common taste for polite literature. Such as the Romans possessed was, like their architecture, their science, philosophy and religion, borrowed outright from the Greeks. They were hungry for new ideas. These the Spaniards undertook to provide. They had descended from a race whose fabulous laws were written in verse, and something of that legendary inspiration must have accompanied them through ages of preceding strife, for suddenly Boetica was peopled with poets. In connection with this it may be noted that, apart from the crop of Augustan rhymsters and essayists, almost everything in the way of literature which Rome subsequently produced is the work of Spaniards. Lucan and the Senecas were Boeticans—Martial, Florus, Quintillian, Pomponius Mila were all of that race. J’en passe et des meilleurs. The Romans, trained by the Greeks, were, it is true, the teachers. Under their heavy hand the young Andalusians lost their way among the clouds of Aristophanes, just as we have done ourselves; they spouted the Tityre tu, and the arma virum, they followed the Odyssey and learned that, in ages as remote to them as they are to us, Ulysses had visited their coast. Indeed the Romans did what they could, and if their pupils surpassed them it was owing to the lack-luster of their own imaginations. But the education of backward Spain was not limited to Greek poets and Augustan bores. Lessons in drawing were given, not as an extra, but as part of the ordinary curriculum. The sciences, too, were taught, the blackboard was brought into use, and Euclid—another Greek—was expounded on the very soil that under newer conquerors was to produce the charms and seductions of Algebra. Added to this, industry was not neglected. The Romans got from them not poets alone, but woolens, calicoes, and barbers too, emperors even. Trajan was an Andalou, so was Hadrian, and so also was that sceptered misanthrope Marcus Aurelius. As for arms, it is written in blood that the Romans would have no others than those which came from Spain. The plebs dressed themselves there. Strabo says that all the ready-made clothing came from Tarragona. From Malaga, which in a fair wind was but six days’ sail from the Tiber’s mouth, came potted herring, fat, black grapes that stained the chin, and wax yellow as amber. From Cadiz came the rarest purple, wine headier than Falernian, honey sweeter than that of Hymettus, and jars of pale, transparent oil. To Iviça the Romans sent their togas; there was a baphia there, a dyeing establishment, which, to be simply charming, needed but the signboard Morituri te salutamus. And from the banks of the Betis there came for the lupanars girls with the Orient in their eyes, and lips that said “Drink me.” In this pleasant fashion Rome, after conquering Spain, sat down to banquet on her products. The Imperial City then was not unlike a professional pugilist who is unable to find a worthy opponent; possible rivals had been slugged into subjection. Perhaps she was weary, too. However great the future of a combatant may be, there comes an hour when contention palls and peace has charms. In any event, Rome at that time was more occupied in assimilating her dominions than in extending the wonders of her sway. And it was during this caprice that Spain found her fifty races fused in one. On the distant throne was a procession of despots, terribly tyrannical, yet doing what good they could. In return for flowers, fruits and pretty girls, they gave roads, aqueducts, arenas, games and vice. Claud introduced new fashions; Nero, the saturnalia. Each of the emperors did what he was able, even to Hadrian, who increased the number of Jews. It was during his reign that were felt the first tremors of that cataclysm in which antiquity was to disappear. Rome was so thoroughly mistress of the world that to master her Nature had to produce new races. The parturitions, as we know, were successful. Already the blue victorious eyes of Vandal and of Goth were peering down at Rome; already they had whispered together, and over the hydromel had drunk to her fall.

The Goths were a wonderful people. When they first appear in history their hair was tossed and tangled by the salt winds of the Baltic. Later, when in tattered furs they issued from the fens of the Danube, they startled the hardiest warriors of the world, the descendants of that nursling of the gaunt she-wolf. Little by little from vagabond herders they consolidated first into tribes, then into a nation, finally into an army that beat at the gates of Rome. There they loitered a moment, a century at most. When they receded again with plunder and with slaves they left an emperor behind. Soon they were more turbulent than ever. They swept over antiquity like a tide, their waves subsiding only to rise anew. And just as the earth was oscillating beneath their weight, from the steppes of Tartary issued cyclones of Huns. Where they passed, the plains remained forever bare. In the shock of their onslaught the empire of the Goths was sundered. Some of them, the Ostrogoths, went back to their cattle, others, the Visigoths, went down to have another word with Rome. It was then that their cousins the Vandals got their fingers on her throat and frightened the world with her cries. In the strain of incessant shrieks the Imperial City fell. From out the ruins a mitered prelate dragged a throne. Paganism had been strangled; antiquity was dead; new creeds and new races were refurbishing the world. Among the latter the Goths still prowled. In the advance through the centuries, in the journey from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, in the friction with the Attic refinement which the Romans had acquired, the Goths left some of their barbarism on the road—not much, however. Historians have it that when they took possession of Spain they manifested a love of art, a desire for culture, and that they affected the manners and usages of polite society. But historians are privileged liars. The majority of those who have treated the subject admired the Goths because they fancied them Christians, and in the admiration they placed them in flattering contrast to their predecessors who were pagans, and to their successors who were Muhammadans. As a matter of fact—one that is amply attested in local chronicles—they were coarse, illiterate and stupid as carps; moreover, they were not Christians, they were Arians, and they were Arians precisely as they were Goths—they were born so. To the dogma of the Trinity and the consubstantiability or non-consubstantiability of Jesus the Christ they were as ignorant as of the formation of the earth. Throughout Europe at that time not a thread of light was discernible. The dark ages had begun. In the general obscurity the Goths were not a bit more brilliant than their neighbors. Under their hand civilization disappeared; in return they gave the Spanish nothing but gutturals and a taste for chicanery. In ninety and nine cases, the specimens of architecture which cheap-trippers admire as due to them are of Saracen workmanship. The monuments which they did erect are not disproportioned perhaps; yet, whatever the casuist may affirm, there is still a margin between the commonplace and the beautiful. In brief, to the Visigoths the world owes less than nothing. They let Andalusia retrograde for three hundred years, and delayed the discovery and development of America. Previous to their coming Cadiz had been a famous seaport. The Romans called it The Ship of Stone. Its sons had been immemorial explorers. The presentiment of another land across the sea was theirs by intuition. They were constantly extending their expeditions. They were in love with the sunset, they sailed as near it as they could, returned for more provisions, and sailed again; nearer, and ever nearer that way. To the Church the theory of the antipodes was an abominable heresy. It was taught that the earth was a flat parallelogram, its extremities walled by mountains that supported the skies. Lactance was particularly vehement on this point, so too was St. Jerome. Vergilius in asserting the contrary threw Christendom into indignant convulsions. It may be remembered that the most serious obstacle which Columbus subsequently encountered lay in the decisions of the Fathers. Now Cadiz had been more or less converted before the advent of the Visigoths, but it had not for that reason put aside its habits and customs. It continued to be essentially maritime; but when the Visigoths came, navigation languished, the Ship of Stone no longer turned to the west, it foundered in a sea of ignorance which was then undiked, and the possible discovery of America was indefinitely postponed. By way of compensation, the Visigoths framed a code of laws the spirit of which still survives, and which is serviceable in showing that the framers possessed two distinct traits, a love of agriculture and a hatred of Jews. Traits which are significant when it is understood that it was through agriculture they were supported and through the Jews they were overthrown. It was the Jews that beckoned the Berbers and their masters the Arabs—the Moors, as those Arabs were called who had deserted the deserts for the African Riviera.